By Ahmed Aboulenein and Sriparna Roy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya told a U.S. Senate panel on Tuesday that he was hopeful President Donald Trump’s administration would reach a settlement with universities that have had research grants suspended.
Dozens of scientists, researchers and other employees at the NIH issued a rare public rebuke on Monday, criticizing the Trump administration for major spending cuts they said harm the health of Americans, politicize research, and waste public resources.
“I’m very hopeful that these universities where these pauses have happened will come to terms so that we can move forward,” Bhattacharya told the Senate Appropriation Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies at a hearing on the NIH’s 2026 budget request.
The NIH has terminated 2,100 research grants totaling about $9.5 billion and an additional $2.6 billion in contracts since Trump took office January 20, they said in the letter. The contracts often support research, from covering equipment to nursing staff working on clinical trials.
Several terminations have already been reversed, said Bhattacharya, and other reversals are possibly on the way.
“I’ve established a process for appeals for those grant terminations and decisions, and hundreds of people have appealed. It won’t take 18 months. It’ll take weeks to get through those appeals. We’ve reversed many of them,” he said. “I didn’t take this job to terminate grants.”
Dozens of patient advocates attended the hearing, including members of the Alzheimer’s Association in purple and the American Cancer Society in blue.
The White House wants to reduce U.S. health spending by more than a quarter next year, with the NIH facing a cut of $18 billion, or 40%, from this year’s budget, leaving it with $27 billion.
The Trump administration has said it wants to cut funding altogether for four of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers while consolidating others into five new ones.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot)
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